The Last Days of New Paris Read online

  The thing swayed up and back from the flesh and debris of the killing ground. It reared, seven, eight meters tall, an impossible composite of tower and human and a great shield, all out of scale and made one looming body, handless arms held almost dainty by its sides, its left thronging with horseflies. It declared itself mournfully, an echoing call of faceplate hinges. When that noise ebbed the huge thing stalked away at last on three limbs: one huge spurred man’s leg; a pair of women’s high-heeled feet.

  And there was quiet. And Thibaut, war’s boy, had crawled shivering at last through the hecatomb in a field of rubble, to where he found the corpses of his parents and wept.

  He has often imagined a vengeful hunt for that officer who first fired, but Thibaut cannot remember what he looked like. Or for the man or men whose ammunition killed his parents, but he doesn’t know who they were. They were all probably among those shot by their own comrades in the chaos, in any case, or crushed by bricks when the manif toppled the façade.

  In rue Giroux, masonry slumps in sloppy drifts. Bricks bounce down a broken slope and a young woman emerges, her face bloody and filthy and her hair spiked with dirt. She does not see Thibaut. He watches her bite her nails and scurry on.

  One of the trapped thousands. The Nazis will never allow Paris to contaminate France. All roads in and out are locked down.

  When it was clear that the manifs, the new things with their new powers, would not disappear, before the Reich had settled for this containment, it had tried first to destroy, then to use them. Or to bring forth its own, less capricious than its infernal allies. The Nazis had even succeeded in invoking a few things with their manifology: incompetent statuettes; a Céline weltgeist, fungal lassitude, semi-sentient dirt and enervation infecting house after house. But their successes were few, unsustainable, uncommandable.

  Now, years on, it seems to Thibaut that the number of manifs has started to diminish. That this is the second epoch of the post-blast city.

  Of course Paris still teems. Just walk if you doubt that, he thinks, see what you meet. Enigmarelle, foppish robot staggered out of an exhibition guide, arms out to lethally embrace. The dreaming cat, as big as a child and incompetently bipedal, watching with sentient intent. You will encounter such figures, Thibaut thinks. For a while yet.

  And if you go on walking like that and stay safe and keep out of sight then you will come some time to be alone again and there will be a stretch of window and bricks untouched by war and you could, for an instant, believe yourself back in old Paris.

  I miss nothing, Thibaut insists to himself once more. Not the pre-war days, nor the recent relative safety of the ninth arrondissement. The stranded Nazis in the tenth could never take those streets, or the altered landscapes they crisscrossed, the sagelands, smoothed alpine topographies like sagging drapes, houses of frozen rooms full of clocks, places where the geography echoed itself. The ninth was too completely made of recalcitrant art for anyone to take. It would shelter no one but the partisans of that art—the Surrealist stay-behinds, soldiers of the unconscious. Main à plume.

  I don’t miss a thing. Thibaut clenches his fist on his weapon.

  Each riverbank tree here is in a different season. Dead leaves and live. Thibaut wants railway lines. Routes out. Under one lamppost, it is night. He leans against it and sits and for long minutes looks up at stars.

  Do I even deserve these places any more? They came at the wrong time and they came in the wrong way. Liberation was fucked up. But if Thibaut can find no spark of joy in them, he thinks, maybe he is no better than one of Stalin’s men. Or a drone for de Gaulle, an enemy of true freedom.

  That isn’t me, he thinks. No.

  He stands and steps back into the sunlight beyond the tiny manif nightlet, and as he does a howl fills the street.

  Instantly Thibaut drops, takes cover behind the stub of a pillar, weapon raised. War has taught him how to be very still. That is not a human noise—nor, he is sure, that of a manif.

  He waits. He controls his breathing and listens to a heavy approach. Something comes slowly into view. Thibaut sights down his rifle and tightens his grip.

  A swaying body like a great bull’s. Its flanks are bloodied, and rainbowed as if with petrol on water. On its brow the thing has many long, gray, random horns, some broken. It bellows again and shows meat-eater tusks.

  It does not move with the dreamlike specificity of a manif but with a thudding, broken step that he can feel through the ground. It comes with nothing of that stir of recognition—even at something inconceivable that he has never previously seen—that a manif brings him. It oozes and drips and raises nausea in Thibaut. Its blood crackles and smokes and hits the pavement in spots of flame. The beast shakes its head and flecks fly from its horns to land wetly. Thibaut’s innards spasm, and he knows from that clench that those are gobbets of manif.

  If the devils and the living art cannot avoid each other, they will fight, terribly. The artflesh dripping from the demon’s face is fresh.

  In the days after the S-Blast, the German forces and the newcomer manifs had been joined, appallingly, by such as this misplaced invader, battalions from below.

  The exigencies of survival sent some of Thibaut’s comrades trying to make sense of these fallen, now risen, embarrassments. They accumulated expertise from bad books they hunted and found. They cajoled information from captured German summoners and specialist priests in Alesch’s nascent bishopric. The intrepid eavesdropped on snips of the demons’ bayed discussions, they pieced together information, parsed rumors of ill-tempered pacts between Hell and the Reich. Élise might have been able to tell him what kind of fiend it is he looks at, as he prays, if to no God, that it will not look at him: all Thibaut knows is that it is a devil, and a big one.

  Like most of its kind the thing is obviously in pain. But that size, whatever its injuries or sickness, they will not help him. The few trinkets he has in his pack for use against the infernal are inadequate: it will kill him if it finds him.

  But the beast shambles painfully away on what seems a varying number of legs and does not look in his direction. It leaves a trail of burning blood and broken ground.

  He waits until it turns off the street, out of sight, and he listens to it haul itself away, and he waits longer until he can hear nothing. Only then does Thibaut slump at last, fingering his nightskirt. Even that, he thinks, tracing the edge of its hem, would not have saved him. I should get off the streets, he thinks. Then: Maybe I should take the Métro, he taunts himself.

  Thibaut considers his dead, in the forest. He considers the ruined plan, the assault from which he exiled himself.

  From his bag he pulls out a pencil and a stained old schoolbook, folded many times. He opens his war notebooks.

  I’m not a fucking deserter. The mission is vacant. I’m not a deserter.

  Thibaut was nearly seventeen when, following survivors’ stories and the noise of shots and burnt and uncannily twisted remains of German patrols and the intuitions that sometimes beset him, he tracked down the Main à plume in the ruins.

  He was waving scrappy publications at them as he came, trembling so hard with nerves that he made the selectors who met him and ushered him into their compound laugh, not unkindly.

  “This is you, isn’t it?” he kept saying, pointing at the pages, the names. They kept laughing when he told them, “I want to join you.”

  They tested him. When he said he couldn’t shoot—he’d not yet held a gun—they joked that he’d have to try automatic shooting. Like automatic writing, they said. “You know who it was said the simplest act of Surrealism is to fire randomly into a crowd?” He did, and they liked that.

  Other examinations. They pointed at certain objects from the junk that filled their cellar, asking him if they were surreal or just trash. Thibaut looked at the configurations and muttered answers too quickly for thought—a claw-and-ball chair leg was nothing, an empty cigar box and a hairbrush were surreal, so on. He corrected himself only once, over
what he could never later remember. They looked at him more thoughtfully when he was done.

  When one of the questioners took off his shoe to rub his toe, with boldness not yet characteristic Thibaut took it from the surprised man, picked up a candlestick he had previously dismissed as mere object and placed it inside the old leather. “Now it’s surreal,” he said. The glances of the selectors—artists, clerks, and curators turned guerilla—had not escaped him.

  “You want to fight, I understand,” the half-shod man said, looking at him sideways. “Right now, though…with all this…why like this? Why with us? With the city like this, don’t we have greater needs than poetry?”

  Immediately Thibaut almost shouted a response. “ ‘We refuse to flee poetry for reality,’ ” he said. “ ‘But we refuse to flee reality for poetry.’ ” The men and women blinked at him. “ ‘No one should say our actions are superfluous,’ ” Thibaut recited. “ ‘If they do, we’ll say the superfluous supposes the necessary.’ ”

  He had recognized the question, the last test. It, and his answer, were the words of Jean-François Chabrun, speaking for the franc-tireurs, Surrealist irregulars, left in Paris when the Nazis came. A prophecy, a promise written after one cataclysm and just before another. They had carried it over after that next, the S-Blast, and Thibaut granted it fidelity.

  He will never be a sharpshooter. He is an adequate hand-to-hand fighter at best. Thibaut was admitted to the Main à plume because of his way of seeing, the connections he makes, the synchronicity he notes and invokes. They taught him to conduct what they called disponibilité, to be a receiver. To tap objective chance.

  In rooms at the top of leaning houses, in a city become free-fire zone and hunting grounds for the impossible, Thibaut learned survival and poetry, from Régine Raufast, Edouard Jaguer, Rius, Dotremont, Chabrun himself, techniques he would take with him later, when training was done, full of thanks and solidarity, to spread the resistance, to join with others, and recruit. In his company, Jacques Hérold set a black chain on fire.

  In the post-blast miasma, all Parisians grew invisible organs that flex in the presence of the marvelous. Thibaut’s are strong.

  The Surrealists trapped behind had known immediately what the newly appeared figures were that the explosion had brought. Not the devils, those tawdry bugbears: them they considered as little as they could. But the others, they knew. They were the first to recognize them, to try to develop a strategy for life and for urban war that afforded them respect. The Main à plume owed them, not obedience, but a kind of fealty: this was hardly the hoped-for insurrection, but these were Surrealist glimmers, these manifs. They were convulsively beautiful, and they were arrived. The poets and artists and philosophers, resistance activists, secret scouts and troublemakers, had become, as they must, soldiers.

  Now, alone, Thibaut drinks to the freedom of Paris from a standpipe in a square full of bricks like failed flowers.

  Months ago, his scouts in the ninth reported demons in a charnel-house off Clichy. Thibaut and the comrades of his cell had looked at each other in horror.

  “They’re not with Nazi handlers,” Virginie said. She was a recent recruit to the Surrealist resistance, ferocious but young and ignorant. “They’re feral. How urgent is it? Do we have to…?”

  “You’ve not dealt with them before,” Thibaut said. “Or you’d know.”

  The thing was, he told her, you could no more accommodate devils than you could a splinter gone septic, an allergic reaction. The power of the arrondissement had kept them out, so far, but for occasional lumbering, blundering intruders. But now they had established themselves, if they were not driven out or destroyed, they would transform the ninth into a zone of blood and infernal agony. The Surrealists had to prepare an exorcism.

  There was a pleasure in some of the process and accoutrements, relics of wizardry that had embarrassed the Enlightenment. Other necessities, though, stank of clericalism, and the partisans were disgusted that they were efficacious. It was with distaste that Thibaut and Élise took a bag of crucifixes, bottles of holy water, bells, to Father Cédric. Élise made a joke—she, the rabbi’s granddaughter, carrying such things. The old priest performed desultory benedictions and they paid him in cigarettes and food.

  “Turn the other cheek, Father,” said Élise at his expression. “Find some Free French if you want willing sheep to patronize. Until then, this is a marriage of inconvenience. You want to walk? There’s the door.”

  He was safer in their company, and they in his. An uncomfortable symbiosis. The Surrealists despised his calling, and he them for their militant atheism, but everyone knew it helped to have a priest perform certain absurdities of his trade if it was demons you had to fight.

  “Why?” Thibaut asked Élise when they left again. “Why do you think it does work? It’s not as if any of this stuff is true.”

  “Maybe devils love ritual as much as people do,” she said.

  However they might mock and bully him, Thibaut’s crew had a degree of unfriendly respect for Cédric: whatever else the man was, he was Resistance. In these streets, his very tradition had become unlikely dissent. Unlike so many clergy, he had refused to make any peace at all with the new Church of Paris, or with its leader, Robert Alesch.

  For months before the reconfiguration, the Abbé Alesch had been a well-known preacher against the Nazis. A very few intimates had known, too, that he worked as part of Jeannine Picabia’s clandestine network, réseau Gloria. He’d been courier and confidant, able, as a priest, to pass through the zones, carrying messages and contraband. His Gloria comrades called him “Bishop,” and he heard their confessions.

  He was a double-agent. In the S-Blast’s aftermath, he had sold his comrades to his Nazi paymasters, and almost every one of them had died. Alesch, V-man, informer, paid not thirty pieces of silver but twelve thousand francs a month.

  Two austere activists, Suzanne Dechevaux-Dumesnil and her lover, the Irishman Beckett, had escaped from the carnage of Gloria. They had gotten word out of Alesch’s perfidy, but he had not cowered. Rather, he had inaugurated a theology of betrayal. A Catholicism of collaboration—with the German invaders, and with those invaders from below. Rome denounced him, and he denounced Rome back. He made himself Bishop in his own Führer-funded church.

  On their hatred for Alesch, Cédric and the Surrealists could agree.

  —

  At twilight the fighters had ascended to the roofscape, their guns loaded with that sardonically blessed ammunition. In Paris you had to be ready to fight art and the Hellish—not to mention Nazis—so they labored under weapons for all eventualities.

  Thibaut was ready for manifs. He had his expertise, he could perform cathexis, or use a weapon itself manifested against them.

  Humans, of course, could be killed with almost anything.

  The partisans picked like wood-gatherers through copses of chimneys. Among the old bricks, dead crows, slates, and gutters, Thibaut saw pendulums and figures made of string. The detritus of the surreal, evanescent unconsciousnesses. There were doors at roofs’ edges. Dim things walking too close, at which he would not look.

  Then the faint sound of screaming. They approached warily. With the sky huge around them, the Main à plume reached the source of noise. They stared down into a warehouse’s cracked skylight as if it were a scrying pool.

  Far below, a man in robes spasmed suspended in the air above the chamber’s dusty floor. He thrashed amid monsters.

  A trumpet-nosed beast with fish eyes swung a cudgel in brutal percussion. A legless thing with bat wings thrashed him with its spiked and suckered tail. Rag doll animals chewed the man’s fingers and gouged him with their horns.

  “My God,” Virginie whispered. “Come on.” The resistance fighters grit their teeth in disgust and quickly readied weapons. A lizard-like doll-thing snarled, a hairy pig-faced assailant leered between assaults.

  “Wait,” Thibaut managed to say. He held up his hand. “Look. Look at hi
s clothes.”

  “Get out of the way, Thib,” said Pierre, aiming through the glass.

  “Wait. He moved just like that a moment ago,” Thibaut said. The man screamed again. “Listen.” Moments passed, and the distinct wavering cry repeated. “Look at the devils,” Thibaut said. “Look at him.”

  The floating man’s eyes were unfocused and as flat as concrete. There was a precision to his sand-colored robes, his beard. He wailed and writhed and his cries grew neither louder nor quieter and the blood pattered unendingly beneath him in a pool that did not spread.

  “Those demons,” Thibaut said at last, “are too healthy. They’re repeating like a scratched record. They aren’t demons. And what they’re torturing isn’t a man.”

  —

  The changing streets of Paris echoed now with the slamming of Hell-hard feet. They had burst from sewers after the blast came, torn open trees like broken doors, hurtling out into the world as the manifs did, though they were not like them, nothing like them, though the explosion had palpably been not of their nature. As if the explosion was not their birth but their excuse. They swam up into the light through pavements made lava, roaring up from a glimpsed painscape. Giants with cobwebs for faces, crab-headed generals encased in teeth. And so on. They wore armor and gold. They cast pestilential spells and yammered with abyssal gusto.

  But the demons winced through their sneers. They rubbed their skins gingerly when they thought they weren’t observed. When they killed and tormented it was in faintly needy fashion. They seemed anxious. They stank not only of sulfur but infection. Sometimes they wept with pain.

  The devils of Paris would not shut up. They declaimed as they came, in a hundred languages, they hissed and howled descriptions of their hadal cities, and beat their claws on the sigils they wore, of the houses of the pit, and they shouted rather too often to those they hunted and killed that it was from Hell that they came, and so that everyone should be terrified.